Modern devices for recording video footage make it easy to accumulate very large amounts of material which take a very long time to review or process. For example, removing uninteresting footage from within shots taken during a holiday can be a time-consuming process. Similarly, security cameras record vast quantities of footage within which only relatively short sequences containing unusual events are of interest afterwards.
Currently, video editing systems do not provide any form of high level segmentation, but are based on extraction of key frames from the footage based on color histograms and motion detection.